ABAP remediation for S/4HANA, in minutes per program instead of weeks

Custom ABAP is the long pole in every S/4HANA programme

The technical conversion is well understood and largely tooled. What takes the time is the code your organisation wrote: the reports, the enhancements, the interfaces, the workarounds that solved a problem in 2012 and have been running ever since.

Some of it breaks outright on S/4HANA. Some of it runs but runs badly, because logic written against a row store behaves differently on a column store. Some of it nothing calls any more and remediating it is money set on fire. Telling those three apart, across thousands of objects, is the work.

Where the time actually goes

A remediation programme priced the conventional way assumes a consultant opens each object, reads it, decides what to do and does it. That is a sound method and it is why the estimates are large. The cost is not the difficulty of any single fix, since most are routine. It is the volume multiplied by the reading.

Agents change that ratio. An agent reads a program it has never seen, works out what it does, identifies why it will fail on S/4HANA, and produces a compliant rewrite. The unit of work moves from consultant-weeks to runtime minutes. What stays human is the decision about whether the rewrite is right, which is a much faster thing to do than the rewrite itself.

Retirement is half the value

The cheapest object to remediate is the one you delete. Runtime statistics show what has actually executed rather than what merely exists, and in most estates a meaningful share of custom code has not run in years: superseded reports, abandoned interfaces, programs written for a process that changed.

We produce a retirement list with the evidence attached, so the decision to drop an object is made on execution data rather than on whether anyone remembers what it was for. Every object on that list is remediation effort you get to decline.

Rewritten for HANA, not just made to compile

There is a low bar for remediation: change what the syntax checker complains about and move on. That clears the conversion and leaves the performance problem intact, because the code is still doing row-store things on a column store, with nested selects inside loops, logic in ABAP that belongs in the database, and full-table reads where a filtered aggregate would do.

Remediation done properly pushes the work down to HANA. That is why the performance results on our case studies come out of remediation projects rather than from separate tuning exercises. The same pass that makes the code compliant makes it fast.

Every change is reviewed before it moves

Nothing an agent produces reaches your transport path without an SAP architect reading it and signing it off. The review catches what the agent cannot know: that this program is being decommissioned anyway, that this apparently redundant check exists because of a regulatory requirement, that this interface has a consumer nobody documented.

We also recommend pairing remediation with automated testing, which generates the regression coverage that proves the rewritten code behaves as the original did. Remediation without that evidence asks the business to take functional parity on trust, and they are right not to.